Dungeons & Dragons III – Fluid Play for Busy People

I’m in law school. It keeps me busy. I also have a range of interests outside school. The players in the campaign I DM are law students too, and they’re at least as busy as I am. It’s occasionally difficult for me to find time during the week to sculpt Sunday’s content as thoroughly as I’d like. It’s also difficult for them to find the time to develop their characters, learn the rules, and learn my world as thoroughly as they’d like. Additionally, we rarely have more than 2-3 hours to play on a given Sunday.

As I’ve played under these circumstances, I’ve quickly developed a personal philosophy for running a campaign for a bunch of time-starved lawyers.

1. My players won’t die. I understand that this may be a contentious point, but there are several important reasons for this. First, and foremost, I encourage my players to spend time and effort developing the character they want to play. Back-story, personality, and mannerisms are all what make the game-play fun for us. Were I to kill off Oz, or Del, or Turhilin, that would represent a huge loss of time and effort to my players, as well as demand another enormous investment of time and effort for them to develop new characters. With time as the limiting factor, player deaths are far more of a hassle than a fun part of the game. I want my players to have fun. Second, player deaths during game-play would eat up the limited amount of game-play time we have by forcing us to pause to create a new player character and weave him into the current situation.
2. During game-play, I rule on all conflicts and rule confusions provisionally, make a note, and look the rule up later. Conflict tends to slow down interminably when I allow my players to argue with me about whether, having cast Blind on a Basilisk, the Basilisk is still able to cast its Petrifying Gaze ability on a player. I tend to rule on the side of what my players want to do, because, in the end, the game exists for everyone to enjoy playing it. So we sail through combat as smoothly as possible and I update our table rules during the week as I investigate each question.
3. I’m learning to keep it simple to allow myself to adjust to inevitable surprises. My instinct is to create finely detailed, internally consistent, fantasy worlds; my NPCs tend to have their own agendas and operate on their own time-frames. Players encounter them if their paths intersect, and, depending on their choices, may not encounter them at that time, or at all. Unfortunately, player choices in this world sometimes stymie what I have planned. For example, in my last session, Athaea the Druid decided to pull a card from my home-brewed Deck of Many Things and found her soul ripped from her body and deposited in some object guarded by some guardian somewhere. This happened while the players were hundreds of feet beneath Cold Heart Keep, invested in this dungeon; one of my players suddenly had nothing to do. In a perfect world, she’d either have her own quest to undertake as a soul, or she’d take over playing another character until the party quested to located her previous character’s soul. But again, time-poor. So, off the cuff, I decided that her soul had been trapped in the magical fountain-shrine I’d planned on using as the central mechanism of the session. I scrambled for a moment but managed to come up with a solution that made freeing Althaea’s soul the trigger that caused the main events of the session to unfold. My tendencies toward complex and sprawling worlds nearly unraveled my sessions and my players’ fun.

I wish I had more time. As the Dungeon Master, I get to play the game more than anyone else by acting as a choice architect and designing engaging worlds. I love it. I get to put on a show for my friends every week and watch them struggle against my puzzles and pretend to be bears and mime their sword-attacks. Unfortunately, I don’t. I’ve been learning how to streamline my play to allow my players to enjoy the game as much as they can with limited time.

Any suggestions to do it better? What do you do?